Unfinished Business

After fishing a short time the other weekend at the local delayed harvest stream, and catching a few trout, I decided this past Saturday that one more trip up to the mountain was in order. Only having an hour or so last time to fish, I felt like I had some unfinished business with these trout. I also felt like I had more fishing to get out of my system before putting away the rods for a while to focus on deer hunting. I got a fairly early start, and arrived at the state park about 8:30 am. Since they don't open the gates until 8:00 am, I was a little surprised to find a few people out fishing already. It turns out they had camped the night before, so they were able to get an even earlier start on their day.

There were a bunch of trout in this pool

 My usual strategy when I'm trout fishing is to cover a fair amount of water, but this time was unusual because the pool I started fishing turned out to be where I stayed. There were people fishing both above and below me, far enough away that we all had room to fish, but it did limit the amount of stream that I could cover without getting out and hiking upstream. It turned out that this wouldn't be a problem because there was a pod of a couple dozen trout right in front of me. I started out the morning fishing a hare's ear bird's nest nymph, and my first few trout came on this.

Jacob Fork Rainbow

As the morning warmed up, I noticed some cream colored midges hatching, and lo and behold, trout started rising to them! This got me excited, and I quickly cut off the nymph and got out my fly box to tie on a dry fly. Of course, all my small midge flies were used up on my last trip to the Davidson River, and since I hadn't expected or even planned to do much trout fishing this late in the season, I hadn't tied any to replace them. I thought that since these fish were recently stocked, they might be fooled by a bigger dry fly. I tried fishing a few different patterns, but without success. Evidently these fish had already figured out that if it was twice the size of what they were eating, they needed to leave it alone.

Jacob Fork Brook Trout

Finally, after digging through my fly boxes, I found a couple of size 18 blue wing olive parachutes that I had tied. Since this was the smallest dry fly I had, I decided to give it a try. It turns out that it was close enough, at least for some of the trout. I got some refusal rises, but still managed to fool several nice rainbows and brookies. The trout seemed much more bunched up this time than they did the week before. I guess the trout had time to migrate to some of the bigger pools after the stockings the other week.

Jacob Fork Rainbow

I was glad that I had a chance to go back and give the trout another try. I would still like to get farther up in the mountains and fish for some wild trout one more time this fall, but I don't know if that's going to be in the cards. Either way, I was thankful for the opportunity to get out and do a little trout fishing and enjoy the fall weather. Willing trout rising to dry flies were just icing on the cake.

Thanks for stopping by!

- Joseph